Poor Fit
In 1959, in Erasmus and the Humanist Experiment, Louis Bouyer wrote: ‘Many, indeed, consider that the Christians of the sixteenth century were unaware of what was required to christianise the immense fund of experiences and new realities that characterised their epoch, and that was why the new world broke from a Church whose representatives were incapable of emancipating themselves from their own set ways. This explanation is at once convenient and flattering for Christians today. It should cause no astonishment that many of them consider it all but axiomatic. They contend, in effect, that, were the modern world to pay them proper attention, their intelligent sympathy would quickly conquer it, and that this world remains alienated from the Church solely through the failure of its retrograde elements. Convincing though this thesis may at first sound, it is certain that such simplification fits in poorly with objective history.’
